This week onshit-I-didn’t-come-up-with-but-wish-I-did-because-it’s-kind-of-awesome:

I have no idea. I sort of spent all week yelling about how much I hate Rick Perry. I’ll make it up to you next week.

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I thought that the food court was a place my parents were going to bring my brother and me to go on trial for not being able to agree on what to do about dinner. With a judge and everything like on The People’s Court.

As they came to get us for the Becoming a Woman movie in sixth grade, the boys were teasing us. I very self assuredly clued them in that they, too, would likely be called to watch their own movie – what did they think tampax were for? (pads for us, and going by the anatomy of my younger brothers, the logical conclusion was…)

On a lightly similar note… a coworkers three year old son asked her why Daddy had a thumb down there.

I used to think that the operator was listening into our calls. Apparently, I was just able to read the future, but mistook her for the NSA. Although, I hope the NSA isn’t all old-timey, like it was in my head, with red lips, big sprayed curls in her hair, and a pinafore dress.

I used to think that thing about the Oreos. Then I watched Wreck It Ralph with my kids and said out loud, ‘HOLY CRAP!! LOOK They’re saying OREO…OHHHHHHHH’ and they ARE Oreos just like I used to think.’ and my kids were like…..”what size was the bus you took to school?” and I was like, “Screw you!! That guy in the mall is just wearing a SUIT! there is no Santa Clause!! And remember Grandma’s super minty cup in the bathroom? That’s because she took a shot then chased it with mouthwash so the rest of us didn’t know she was ball to the wall drunk every day!!!” ps…my kids now sniff their cups before they take a drink just to be safe……

When I first heard the Three Dog Night Song, my girlfriend and I thought the lyrics were, “Eli’s coming in a cocksafe . . .” and we asked another kid, what’s a cocksafe, because we had NO idea (just that it must be really gross and how could they play a song like that on the radio, anyway). When the kid we asked stopped laughing we found out the lyrics were actually, “Eli’s coming and the cards say. . .”

Until my mid twenties I thought the signs in elevators that say “In case of fire use stairs” meant that there might be a fire and people might want use the stairs instead of if the building is on fire don’t use the elevator.

I come from a family of ppl with severe allergies & aversions to cats (….can…can i still join the tribe?) as a result i never spent time with cats. Until i was in my late teens, i thought cats didn’t poop. I thought they were kind of the opposite of birds–instead of their pee coming out with their poop, cats’ poop came out with the pee. That’s was the litterboxes were for.

I thought a lugie was AN alugie until I was nearly 20. And I thought Elvis was singing about his “loose weight shoes” instead of blue suede until I was 15. I figured that’s how he danced so well. The shoes made his feet loose. Make sense, right? Right?!

When my son was 4 he learned the Pledge of Allegiance at preschool. He wanted me to practice it with him at home. We finished the pledge “…with liberty and justice for all.” He yelled, “Wait you forgot the last part!” Then he very seriously stated, “You may be seated.”

Until I learned about editing, I was convinced that the dates on “Love Connection” occurred between the commercial breaks. I could never figure out how ALL OF THAT HAPPENED so fast. I had a very weird view of dating until I figured out what was really happening.

When my youngest daughter was 6, we were listening to the radio and Hall and Oates “Maneater” came on. She asked, “why does the woman eat men?” I told her it was just an expression she replied “she eats them with expression?” I didn’t know what to say to explain…after pausing, she said “Is this a song about zombies?” “yes it is, yes it is!”

Until about 5 years ago (I am 40 now) I thought the ABC Package store, was a place like Mail Boxes Etc., where you could take your packages and mail them. Then I actually went into one with a friend. She about pee’d her pants laughing when I told her.

I still think it’s Knights in White Satin, and when I was little I thought the “awfully wedded” thing too. It’s good to have peoples. LOL

Awesome. I thought “Tomorrow … on Today” was the stupidest thing ever said on television and I hated NBC for saying it every. single. freaking. day. Was it on tomorrow or was in on today? Make up your mind. I think I was like 12 when I realized the show was called Today.

When I was little I would sweep my dads body shop and sing along into the broom, “hold me close I’m tired of dancing” was a very popular song… Took me a long time to make the connection to my dads laughter

I thought that the part of the Lord’s Prayer that said ” and lead us not into temptation” was actually “and lead us not into Penn Station”.
This is the big train station that is right under Madison Square Garden in NYC.
My dad invited me to go see a hockey game, at the Garden, and that we would take the train in from NJ.
I was all like ” Oh no, you’re not gonna lead me into Penn Station!!!”
Later, I heard him muttering something to my mom about “your son”…

When I was little, I believed so completely in Santa Clause that I freaked out at the idea of this strange old man coming into my bedroom at night, and the entire family had to put their stockings out on the landing for the next 2 christmases.

I thought the presidential candidates literally ran for president. I remember wondering how they could run so fast when they were so old. However I blame America for having elections on the same year as summer Olympics (1984, Dukakis vs Reagan). I figured it out by the next elections.

““I thought snails were slugs who found homes.” ~ @LaurenCentrella” My husband pointed this one out to me. I had to ask him if it was true. Up until today, I thought they were just like hermit crabs…. He insists that it’s important to note that I’m 28 years old. >.>

When my neighbor across the street had a baby, I asked my mom what color it was. She responded, “what color do you think it is?? Blue?” me. “no, mommy – is it a black baby or a white baby??” didn’t quitegrasp race and ethnicity until elementary school…

Okay, “Blinded by the Light” is totally talking about douches. I have looked up the lyrics and supposedly he is saying ‘deuce’, but as far as I know the two are not pronounced the same. So clearly he is screwing with us. I also thought “Night Moves” by Bob Seger was “Night Moon”, which sort of makes sense even if it’s a little redundant. And obviously it is “Knights in White Satin”, duh. 🙂

When I was young and dinosaurs freely roamed the earth, we used to read a publication called the TV Guide, wherein I frequently saw a listing for what I only assumed was a talk show, “To Be Announced.” I was 16 when I suddenly got it. Unfortunately for me, I got it out loud in front of the whole family…

I remember thinking that “pitch” (as in “pitch black”) meant “extremely.” And so I would describe especially vibrant bananas as “pitch yellow” and so on. It took me a looooong time to realize what pitch actually was…

In the phrase “Contents under pressure”, I thought the word “contents” was a verb that would imply some sort of implosion or explosion. As in, do not try to crush this can, it will content and hurt someone. I still read it that way in my head. Also, I always read the sign on automatic doors as “Automatic Caution Door”. Can’t un-see that.

Adding on to Hank’s thought, we have a giant statue of Jesus nearby at the Great Passion Play. When I worked in retail, people always asked if it was natural or manmade. My hubby received that question, too, and he told them it was natural, and they had to mow down all the little ones that popped up overnight like mushrooms. He said that’s where the souvenir statues in the shops came from. PEOPLE BELIEVED HIM.

We have an eye glass store called “Eyewear Liquidators”, their commercials sing their name over & over, for years I thought they were singing “I wear lick wedaters”. I had no idea what lick wedaters were or why someone would sing so enthusiastically about them.

Up until I was 17, I thought my dad just put water in his hair to make it stay. (Because that’s all I’d ever seen him do every time I walked past the bathroom.) Then I saw him actually put gel in his hair.

When my dad got his motorcycle & I was learning how to drive (in my early 20s), I said that motorcycles were safer than cars because you could actually see the areas immediately around you–which you can’t do with cars.

I’m 28 now.

These are still two of my dad’s favorite stories to tell, & they both get uproarious laughter each & every time–from my dad AND from his audience!

Enjoyed this post.. and ok, my mixed up lyric is a favorite joke now between me & hubby. He loves “classic rock”, and I’m not really there with him on it. He listens to Led Zepplin, and me, not so much. So, for a long time, I didn’t know the lyrics, and I told him the song was funny.. “you need Koolaid, really? lol..” ya.. whole lotta love & Koolaid. So, whenever it comes on the radio, I make sure to announce that he needs Koolaid. Been a few years, we still get a chuckle out of it.

OMG,
I am 29, and just had my world blow open. It’s not “Knights in White Satin”????

One that I had was from when I was about 6. There was a 1-Hour photo store on the corner in Tacoma where I lived. I asked my dad what it meant, he told me that the store had cameras set up and every hour they would take pictures of the cars that passed by. I thought that until I was 18 and actually went into the store.

When I was little……..I remember my dad coming home and telling me that on the weekend we were gonna go to the flea market……(that term alone paints all sorts of amazing mental pictures in and of itself)…..but in what was surely a state of wonder, I asked my dad what that was………He told me it was where all the fleas from the flea circus ended up…..me being the gullible dork I was totally bought it. I don’t think anyone has ever been so excited to hit the dirt mall. Needless to say, when we arrived at the flea market, I was thoroughly disappointed. My dad got a huge laugh out of it though 😛

I must admit I also thought all dogs were boys and all cats were girls and they mated to have boy puppies and girl kitties. On a related note, I was in the store with my toy poodle, Thor, whom I groom to have a mustache and goatee. A guy came up and told me ‘she’ was a beautiful dog. I told him he was a boy dog and the guy stared at me confused and said, “but she’s white!” I had to lift Thor up to show off his underneathy bits to convince him he was in fact a boy. I can only assume he thought all dogs with white hair were girls, all dogs with black hair were boys and can’t begin to imagine what he thought was the sex of all those dogs that are multi-coloured.

and clearly, i can’t even get my own website address right.. i wondered why it looked wrong! >.< ok, in my defense, my computer died, i'm borrowing a crap laptop, until infinity, and i have nothing on it. i googled my own blog to find the address & must have pulled up my old one that i left.

There is old version of “Jolly Old St Nicholas” performed by Maurice Chevalier that I listened to when I was a kid. Because of his French accent I thought the lyrics included the phrase “shoes for me dear Santa Claus” until my wife finally corrected me.

Definitely yelling at Perry, too. But loving Wendy. And loving John Oliver for featuring her and her sneakers on The Daily Show the other night, and saying she might have invented a new product endorsement – “Fila” Busters. (Too bad she wasn’t actually wearing Fila shoes; that would have made it perfect.)

When I was little, my dad told me that touch lamps were for blind people, so they didn’t have to find the knob. I didn’t realized that it was ingrained in my brain until somebody asked me why they made touch lamps.

I was convinced that as long as you had a bank account you could just take whatever money you needed from an ATM. That is until I got in a ton of trouble for rolling my eyes and telling her to just go to the bank when she was worrying bout being short on money. Oh how I wish it worked that way now!

Sorry this is a day late! I was nuts even as a kid. 1. I would dance around in a saucy manner singing “Because I’m a Woman.” I was 5, and I thought this is what it meant to be horny because my dad inherited a pair of my Great Uncle Henry’s jeans with a patch on the knee. It had a devil on the patch with the word “horny” on it, and when I inquired about what this patch meant my dad looked befuddled and said it meant “to be sexy.” I was 6, and I’m not sure how I even knew what “sexy” meant. 2. The kicker…I could not say the color “orange” between the ages of 2-4. Instead, I said “ornish.” But I didn’t think said color was a color. I thought it meant bacon. And then the fatty part of the bacon was called “pineapple.” I’m a vegetarian now, and I’m quite schooled in diction now…;)

My son, Drew, thought his name was Justdrew because when people asked his name and I replied “Drew” they would always ask “Is it Andrew or just Drew” and I would answer “Just Drew”… he figured it out in first grade…

“I thought signs saying “Trespassers will be prosecuted” meant they would be killed.” ~ @mwkmom

ME TOO. I clearly didn’t know the difference between “prosecuted” and “executed.”

I also used to think that movies were like plays. The actors just performed it all the way through and someone recorded it. And the actors had to perform the movie again for every copy of the VHS. I was always impressed that the actors did everything the same way on everyone’s VHS.

Oh jeez, y’all just made my entire day with all these, I have totally found my people! When I was a kid(even through my teens) I thought that mail got from city to city through giant pneumatic tubes, like the kind at drive-up tellers at banks. I thought you put the mail in the mailbox at the post office, and it went into an underground tube that took it to the right city! It made so much sense in my head, much more than flying letters in planes! Of course I also spent an entire summer after I learned to read believing we were all characters in a giant book, and being afraid of whoever was “reading” it would finish and close the book and we would all die. It made more sense to me than what we learned in Sunday school.

I thought the Steely Dan song Bodhisattva lyrics were “can you show me, the shine if your Japan, the sparkle of your vagina, yes I’ll be there….Bodhisattva Bodhisattva etc. It’s actually the sparkle of your China.

When I was a kid, my mom taught us not to eat raw eggs, because they’d make you sick. But she’d let us lick the bowl whenever we baked a cake. So I thought that adding flour and sugar to raw eggs made them safe to eat.

I thought Mars Bars were poisonous because my dad took them out of my halloween candy with all the homemade stuff and the apples that might have razor blades in them. It was years before I realized they were just his favorite.

When I was little my great grandmother died and my grandmother told me they were going to spread her ashes…. I thought they had saved up all her cigarette ashes! It took days of them explaining for me to understand cremation. I thought it was so odd, I had pictured all these sad people carrying ashtrays around.

I’m still going with “Knights in White Satin” they’re the manliest and I always thought it was “Big ‘Ole Jet out of ‘Lina” (like North or South Carolina?).

I thought the things in the kitchen were called “covers” because they covered up the dishes & food & stuff. My sister called homeless people “indignant” instead of indigent. Apparently they were really pissed about having no place to live.

Until I was about 25 or so, I thought in the song, “Winter Wonderland,” the lyric was “Later on we’ll perspire, as we dream by the fire” instead of “we’ll conspire, as we dream by the fire.” Because if you’re laying by the fire, you’ll be hot. And perspire sounds a lot better than “we’ll sweat by the fire.” Made total sense to me. Until someone finally noticed that’s what I sing!

My brother until he was in his teens thought that all the pad commercials on TV were because women occasionally leaked pee.

I always thought that the Boy George song, “I tumble for ya” was actually, “I come from Moya” and then I couldn’t help wondering where Moya was located… I also believed that mountains were the dead buried bodies/remains of dinosaurs. My poor husband.lol

Valerie P.: My son, aged ~4, was FURIOUS with me that I didn’t know that the lyrics to that AC/DC song were “dirty deeds in the dungeon deep.” For weeks. I eventually started it singing it that way just to keep him from yelling at me. He’s now 19 and swears this never happened.

To everyone else who keeps asking, the Moody Blues song is technically “Nights in White Satin” (think sheets).

And count me among the people who thought musicians lived in the radio station. Actually, I ORIGINALLY thought they lived in the RADIO, and wondered why we never fed them, and worried about them getting cold in the car overnight in winter. When I mentioned this to one of my parents (I forget which one), they scolded me for being silly (… I was three…) and pointed to the radio, asking how I thought a grown person could possibly fit in there.

I asked “Where does the music come from then?” and was told, “From the radio station!”

So I pondered it for a while and that was when it clicked – oh! Of course! When you make a record everybody likes, you have to move to the radio station, where you take turns playing your song. FOREVER. I felt so sorry for the people who made a nice song and then had to go spend the rest of their lives in the radio station, but very proud of having figured out the logical answer to “how does the music get on the radio” without (much) help from a grownup.

My confession: I used to think that 70’s TV show “Family Affair” was actually called “Family of Hair.” And I had a Mrs. Beasley doll, so it was really cool that the little girl on the show wanted to have one, too. (Clearly it was the other way around.)

I didn’t exactly have any beliefs of my own that were totally wrong per say but I did used to believe everything that my Grandpa Matt told me so when he asked me to collect up all the caterpillars in the vegetable garden so he could count them. Then sent me off to the local shop for sweets so he could get on with counting them when I delivered him a large bowl full. I didn’t even think twice when he told me that he’d let them all go again but that I’d done really well to collect up all 267. In retrospect I think that there was some green caterpillar mush on the compost heap that night.

1. When I was really little (5 or 6), I thought all black people spoke Spanish because Claire Huxtable did. I wasn’t sure why this didn’t apply to Cliff.

2. A friend of mine went to Italy and kept seeing signs everywhere that said “una strada via” with arrows on them. He kept thinking that Una Strada Via must be a nice place if there are so many signs telling you where to go. Finally, someone he was with who spoke Italian explained that it just means one way road. (I could be remembering the exact phrase wrong. That’s just what I came up with based on my two years of college Italian).

In response to a previous comment: When I have kids, they’re definitely going to grow up believing I must protect them from the dangerous poison-razor filled mini Butterfingers. And Reeses.

I STILL think it says in that Christmas song “Later on we’ll perspire, as we sit by the fire…..” no matter what anyone says. Wouldn’t you perspire if you sat by the fire. As you would say: You’re Welcome.

Until I was 18 I thought that “rubbers” for contraception were small rubber plugs that men put in their penises. I was so confused about how women would put a hole in one when they really wanted to get pregnant. They must have a long, thin, strong needle to poke a hole into a skinny plug.

For several years my brother and I thought that the movie theater was called the Theater Nearu “(you know, “theater near you”–I don’t know why but it was spelled that way in my head). My mom sometimes calls it that to tease us.

When I was little I thought it was called “old timer’s” not until I was in my teens did I realize it was Alzheimer’s. Also when I was little I thought that cartoons were real and I so was desperate to find the land where cartoons lived to live there myself.

I used to think beans were just really small potatoes. When I “realized” this, I asked my mother for verification and (probably in order to shut me up) she told me I was right.

I thought that the “speed limit” was a physical place, and, once you drove beyond the limit, you got arrested. My mother, who obviously was quite prepared for parenthood, told me that, not only did a person get arrested, their children would be given up for adoption.

When I was little (this dates me) I thought if I just could color in the people on the TV that the colors would attach and our B&W set would turn into a color TV. I tried to do it once or twice but the people wouldn’t hold still long enough for me to get the whole picture colored so it never worked. Luckily my mother never caught me at it.

Proving that wisdom doesn’t always come with age though, or possibly that I’m just badly out of the pop culture loop, for the longest time I thought that Jessica Simpson was one of the Simpsons. I never quite figured out if she was Bart’s mother or sister though.

Mine are both related to signs you see on the side of the road. I thought that “Hidden Driveway” meant that the driveway was camouflaged in some way and would always try to find it; I also thought that “Falling Rock” meant that it was the same rock that fell every time.

OMG The AC/DC song DOESN’T say “Thunder Chief”???? Um, to me, it will ALWAYS say Thunder Chief. Dirty Deeds and the Thunder Chief. I didn’t get it, but have always though “Eh, it’s AC/DC, I’m sure they had their reasons.” Yeah, I’m 35.

I grew up in the boonies, so I had no idea what a cul-de-sac was until I was like 15. I also thought cabbage and lettuce were the exact same thing, some people just called them one or the other out of preference. My fellow teenage friends thought both of these things were hilarious.

When I was little I thought that when I closed my eyes the world disappeared and then magically reassembled when I opened them. I would shut my eyes really tight and then open them as fast as I could, to try and catch the world not being there.

Also my dad told me that beef jerky was actually made out of scabs from cow’s knees and I believed that for a long time.

I believed, for many years, that Bad, Bad Leroy Brown had a raisin in his shoe. It made sense to me – wouldn’t anyone be grumpy and inclined to fight if they had to walk around with a squishy old raisin between their toes?

Until I was in my 20’s I thought they were Chester Drawers, not chest of drawers.

I also thought Elementopee was in the middle of the alphabet.

And I Googled “Knights in White Satin” and thought y’all were all just idiots and didn’t realize you WERE saying the right thing because it was clearly using the word “satin” because Google pulled the song up with that search. It wasn’t until the next to the last post when I realized it’s Nights.

Just had an awesome laugh at my 49 year old husband who honestly thought it was “Knights in White Satin” and then laughed at all of y’all who thought Roy Orbison was actually blind. Was feeling pretty good about myself…..but wait, it’s NOT “Blinded by the light, wrapped up in a douche”? bwah hahaha

And ummmm……my (then) future husband to explain that men didn’t have to hold their penis when they pee because otherwise it would fly around like a hose. (I didn’t have any brothers…..I honestly thought it would fly around like a hose until I was 20). He (who I above made fun of for the Knights thing) also had to explain to me just a few years ago that “subtle” when written was actually the same word I pronounce “suttle” and they are NOT two different words. I think I was 40 years old at the time. I also thought hors d’ oevrs or however it’s spelled was pronounced Horz d’verz forever…… (I am not a smart woman /Forrest Gump voice)

We call my Dad’s aunt “Auntie” (pronounced like Annie with a long a) so I thought that was her name until I was 10. My parent’s brought in a birthday cake and I thought we’d been given the wrong one and kept asking (loudly for maximum embarrassment) who “Eula” was.

When I was younger, my brother told me the balls on telephone wires were full of helium to help keep them up. He also told me that the Olympic Peninsula across Puget Sound was Japan and I couldn’t figure out why the airplane ride to Korea took so long.

I also thought that Gene Simmons and Richard Simmons were brothers for a very long time. And earlier this year, I thought people were talking about Mumford and Sons were talking about Sanford and Son, and I couldn’t figure out why they were so excited about a 40 year old show.

As a kid I thought that if you swallowed watermelon seeds you’d grow a watermelon in your belly. So when I saw pregnant ladies I would tell them “you’re not supposed to swallow the seeds!” and they’d be very confused.

About joannerjoanner’s “kneepits”: My oldest son referred to his “legpits” on numerous occasions. He was talking about the area where his legs met his crotchal zone. It kind of makes sense if you think about it. (Then you start making comments about how weird it is that you are thinking about legpits and people look at you all funny.)

As for WarPizza’s: I thought that too, but I didn’t wonder how they all fit in. Obviously, the musicians left the studio when their song was over and ran quickly to play their song in the next radio station. Had I ever heard the same song playing on 2 different stations at the same time, it would have blown my little mind. Obvious solution: all bands have a TARDIS! (Great, now I want to join a band. Who’s with me?)

When I was about 4 or 5 my dad told me that pepper (the spice) was ground up bugs, like flies and mosquitoes. To this day, 50 years later, I still refuse to use it.

When my boys were little, they wouldn’t let me drink ANYTHING while I was driving. And the first time they actually saw me drink a beer from a can at a barbeque picnic, they were disheartened and gravely disappointed. I was not the angel they thought I had been for so many years. (I always used a glass or a red Solo cup. Apparently they didn’t realize it was beer.)

That version of the Food Court sounds like a great idea. I’m tired of “making dinner” meaning “making one dinner for the grown ups, a second for my oldest, and a third for my youngest.” Time for the boys to face The Food Court! (insert courtroom drama music here)

Oh! And my Mom thought all of the roads running next to freeways were one long road named “Frontage.” She also thought it was pronounced frahn-taje, like it was French. She found out otherwise when we moved states and commented on it. She was 40. 🙂

Juleah B. (#124):
“When I was a kid(even through my teens) I thought that mail got from city to city through giant pneumatic tubes, like the kind at drive-up tellers at banks. I thought you put the mail in the mailbox at the post office, and it went into an underground tube that took it to the right city! It made so much sense in my head, much more than flying letters in planes!”

Oh. MYGAWD. YOU TOO?! I have a frickin’ internet twin! LOL.

When I was a kid, I thought this about the mail:

The mail drops down this chute that’s underneath the mail bin, & leads to this MASSIVE underground chamber. This is where the sorting gets done, with several workers keeping an eye on things (making sure the system doesn’t get clogged or a letter doesn’t get stuck, etc.). The mail sits on a few conveyor belts & those lead to places the letters are supposed to go, & somewhere along the line, the letters go aboveground to warehouses that then sort the mail for each postman’s route.

**************

Most recently, I thought “motorboating” meant taking a wind-up toy & running it over your partner’s boobs while making the sound of a motorboat.

My uncle Steve, who is a 6th grade science teacher (an Authority on Things, and apparently also a troll), told me when I was about 5 that you could tell the difference between male pine trees and female pine trees by the pine cones…on male trees, they pointed up (hyuck-hyuck). I was 18 years old and walking across a college campus when I saw a pine tree (cones UP, bitchachos) and started laughing hysterically. I then proceeded to tell my 4 year old brother the same lie (troll genes)…I think he was about 16 when he figured it out.

When we were wee ones, my friends and I were watching “Father of the Bride”. When Steve Martin says, “Don’t forget to buckle your condom! I mean, seat belt!” I asked, “What’s a condom?”. One of my friends gravely replied, “Oh, I know what THAT is. . . It’s kind of like an apartment.” We all looked at each other and assumed it was just too sophisticated and grown up to contemplate as children.

We all now know the difference between condoms and condos, just for the record.

My youngest son (6 years old) just yesterday told me that he was able to count to 330 and so he had $330 to spend on things. My boys have some gift cards saved up from birthdays, etc and he was trying to figure out how much he had. 1) It’s nowhere NEAR $330. 2) If that’s how earning money worked, I’d spend all day just counting. “Nobody bother daddy, he’s counting in his room. If he does really well, he should have enough for new tablet computers for everyone!”

When I was little Richard Simmons was all over the place. I saw him in an interview an I couldn’t understand why they where calling that LADY by a mans name. At 4 or 5 I could only see the behavioral gender markers at the time. It was a good few years before I realized that he was infact a man. But it confused me for years.

I was in college when Phil Collins came out with Invisible Touch. This was released about the time that Chilis introduced “Top Shelf” Margaritas. For several years, I swear I heard, “She seemed to have an invisible top shelf” and I thought that was the weirdest thing.

And, yes, I was in college, but I wasn’t a drinker or smoker of anything. I thought the above completely sober. It was a couple years before I finally understood the true lyric. I think I still prefer my lyrics.

When I was young we were too poor to get ice-cream from the ice-cream truck. My mother told me that it was called the fish truck and they only sold fish (which I didn’t like). She would say “wave bye to the fish truck”! I didn’t find out until I was 12 what the truck really was.

I also used to think my pelvic bones were my rock hard abs I was 18 until I figured out I didn’t have any defined abs!

When I was younger I used to confuse Jim Bowie with David Bowie. I’m pretty sure that’s why I got an ‘F’ on my report about Ziggy Stardust at the Alamo. I also used to think Bowie knives were created specifically to kill David Bowie, and that was his only immunity. Like silver bullets to werewolves.

My sister grew up thinking that when you had to put a pet down (euthanize), that the process involved a grocery checkout lane belt. You just put the animal on one side and when he got to the Vet, he’d get a shot.

When I was younger I thought ninjas lived in my basement but only came out when the lights were off and jumped behind the couches when we turned them on. I used to bolt up the stairs when I turned the lights off so they wouldn’t be tempted to kill me and I would check behind all the furniture if I was the first one downstairs.

Someone up there was never scarred by the skit that someone did that involved the “Always Fairy. With Wings!” (annul adult SF relaxacon that did a vaudeville show. Theme was fairies and etc that year. And yes, the girl stuck maxipads all over herself.)

My husband’s cousin’s dad made up 3 words for his son. When he was a teenager, he learned that croutons were not called ‘zornax’ from a waitress at a restaurant. He’s still trying to figure out what the other 2 made up words are!

Brilliant. I just giggled my way through this. My puppy is looking at me warily. XD

I was notoriously difficult to fool as a kid (not so anymore!) so I don’t have any “when I was little” anecdotes to share. But I was probably 16 before I figured out it’s “intents and purposes,” not “intense purposes.”

When I was a teenager, my grandfather was in the hospital and dying. When I told my boyfriend, sobbing through tears, that my father had to go back to Iowa and take care of things because he was the “executioner” of his estate, he looked at me with equal parts shock and disgust.

When I became a teacher, my son asked if I was going to be a different person….because at his school, there were “Girls” bathrooms, “Boys” bathrooms, and “Teacher” bathrooms. Apparently, I was not going to be a girl anymore.

And I always thought that you fed the baby through the mom’s bellybutton when she was pregnant, since that was what was explained to me by my dad. That was an awkward conversation with my obstetrician that could have been avoided.

OH. And Idiot McGoodhair? Yeah, I know I SHOULD be out at the capitol tomorrow from 12noon-5pm to Stand Up For Women (and against his moronic butt), but instead I will be at work. More people should go. https://www.facebook.com/events/139027312967322/

I think this might be a New Zealand thing only but I thought that Waikikamukau (why-kick-a-moo-cow) was a real place and I wanted to visit it cause I saw it in a book of funny place names. Turns out it is just a generic place name for small towns in New Zealand 😦

I thought people who were in love were having an affair, until I was in like, 5th or 6th grade playing Barbies with a friend, who informed me otherwise when my barbie asked her ken to have an affair with her.

“I thought that gunpoint was a place where bad things happened. “Man held at gunpoint”‘.” ~ @(redacted)

That’s a line from a “Friends” episode.

(I had a chance to look this one up and I found it attributed to tons of strangers all over the internet who also claimed to have thought the exact same thing when they were kids, so it’s entirely possible it’s just like everyone believing all cats are girls. But it was also similar to a line in a Friends episode so I’m going to take it down so the author doesn’t get messed with if it was unintentional. 🙂 ~ Jenny)

I watched a lot of horror movies as a child (thanks mom!) and therefore was in perpetual fear of one thing or another. At one point, I fully believed that I was turning into a werewhoop (werewolf for those who don’t speak toddler). Still haven’t lived it down and I’m 28.

“I thought signs saying “Trespassers will be prosecuted” meant they would be killed.”

Me too! I thought ‘prosecuted’ meant ‘electrocuted’ and was terrified to walk anywhere near one of those signs in case I accidently put a finger in the prohibited area and was hauled away to be electrocuted.

i wondered what the H stands for, so i looked it up on wikipedia, and apparently harold is not that for off 😀

Using the name of Jesus Christ as an oath has been common for many centuries, but the precise origins of the letter H in the expression Jesus H. Christ are obscure. […] it is plausible that JHC similarly led to Jesus Harold Christ, Harold coming from the mispronunciation of the word “hallowed” of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name.”

I used to think that newscasters could see me, since they were the only people on TV who would look directly at me so I would always make sure I was totally dressed whenever I was around the TV. I flashed a cute news lady once, but she didn’t react. It really jacked up my self esteem.

When I was pregnant with my third child, my older daughter (then 3 1/2) asked what color the baby was going to be. My husband (we’re both white btw) whipped his head around and said “It better be white!” Lol I about wet my pants laughing 🙂 Also my sister thought the song lyric “life in the fast lane” was “I found the vasaline” I like her version better

bahahahah! I loved the Jesus grew up to be Santa Claus. That’s ingenious!

I always heard my aunt say that pickles grew on trees, so I believed it too. I think I was in my late 20’s before I discovered this myth.

My kids are hilarious, but the most recent was when my 7-year-old came home from school and told us about all the fun he had with his class at “Cinnamon Bun Park” (Assiniboine Park) I didn’t have the heart to correct him. I think even I am renaming said park lol. And for the longest time every time we’d go over a bridge he’d say, “look a bitch!” The first time I almost yelled at him for swearing lol

When I was a kid, my sister and I both thought giving someone the finger meant saying “Baby!” We used to flip the bird to each other all the time until our parents realized how clueless we were and educated us.

I have to mention my mom’s faux pas because it still makes me laugh. She thought LOL meant “Lots Of Love,” so she posted it on a Facebook thread about someone’s death. Oops…

When I was little, I thought that “don’t drink and drive” meant that no one in a moving vehicle could consume any liquid. I was convinced that the cops would arrest me if I even had one sip of water in the backseat.

You know how the bottom of an exit ramp has a sign that says “Wrong Way” so that you don’t get on going in the wrong direction, in order to avoid a horrible head-on collision? I actually thought that they were telling us that we were going in the wrong direction, as in we were about to get really lost. I remember asking my dad how they knew we were going in the wrong direction.

And I just had to google the Moody Blues. I’ve had that wrong forever. Either version, I don’t really get it.

When I was a kid, I thought the way that you made your breath smell better was to put Chapstick on your teeth. I had all of my friends doing it too until our parents found out and told us that it wasn’t true

Up until a few years ago, I thought Chicken-fried Steak was made from chicken. I mean, it’s got “chicken” in its name and other meat is called steak (i.e. tuna steak). After a 10 minute debate with my husband at a restaurant (I was 100% sure I was right), it wasn’t until the waiter confirmed that it was indeed beef steak – not chicken, that I accepted the illogical truth.

When my son was about 4, he was talking to his dad about his time in the Army and he asked what (if anything) did he shoot. His dad answered “targets” and after a pause, my son asked him if he also shot the Kmarts.

And I am also one of the ones that believed that all the bands were actually at the radio station to play their songs.

When I was little, I thought the people on TV could see and hear me if I could see and hear them, but only for sporting or live events. Because, you know thinking scripted shows could see or hear me would OBVIOUSLY be obsurd.

Omigods.
LOVED the “jet airliner” one – I never knew the same of the song; thought it was “we go jam in a lighthouse.” the next lyrics didn’t make much sense, but drugs explain most weird-ass lyrics.

My best one is that when I was a little girl of five, my dad had taught me some things about First Nations in Canada, and I thought hide-a-beds were Haida Beds, invented and manufactured by the Haida people. I was probably thirteen or fourteen when I finally figured out the spelling behind the sound.

When I was little & The Donnie & Marie Show was on the air, I didn’t know they were brother & sister. I thought they were married. I thought they were the most beautiful married couple ever because they looked exactly alike. I was not a brilliant child.

I took many things literally when I was a kid so when the song “Red Roses for a Blue Lady” was popular I couldn’t imagine how on earth the lady turned blue – I’d never seen a blue person before… it was years before I figured out that “blue” was another name for “sad”. Would have made a great song for the movie “Avatar”…

I second the person who thought “drinking” referred to all liquids. There was a PSA that had some female rock group singing a song that had a line “If you wanna be smart, don’t start (to drink).” I remember asking my mom why the band never got thirsty.

When I was 11 we received an invitation that stated hors d’oeuvres would be served. I asked my mom what “whores d ovaries” were. She cried from laughing so hard, but never corrected me. I wondered about that for years until I learned what whores and ovaries are, and decided that having them at a wedding reception was both inappropriate and quite fitting at the same time.

When I was about 8 or so I stayed up to watch an episode of MASH with my parents. The storyline for that ep was that Hot Lips Houlihan liked this guy but didn’t know if she could stay with him because he was impotent. I asked Mom what that meant, and she said it meant “he can’t pee.” And for YEARS after that I would worry whenever I heard that word. How could someone live without peeing? Wouldn’t they get sick and explode??? I told Mom this story a few years ago and she couldn’t stop laughing.

bawhahah….these comments are all so great…As a kid I too thought cats were ladies and dogs were men and when they fell in love and got married and had children, the boy babies were puppies and the girl babies were kittens. My father-in-law thought Hall & Oates was Hollow Notes. Which, to his credit, would be a clever band name.

I believed until embarrassingly recently that wasps took actual photographs of your face when you pissed them off, which they stored in tiny wasp pockets I guess, so that they could track you down later and sting you. Thanks, mom.

I would love to blame this on me being young, but up until recently I believed they were called “rolly coasters,” not “rollER coasters.” You know, because they’re rolly? My kids say this too. It drives my husband crazy that I still say this at 32.

I thought that “misled” was the past tense of “to misle” (pronounced with a long i) until I was 27. As in, “You are misling him when you tell him you like him but you really don’t.”

Also, my family got a new car the same weekend I got m drivers license and my father told me it was illegal in the state of CT to let a new driver drive a new car until she had her license for a year. This sounded completely reasonable to me and I told everyone until my mother made my dad come clean.

Just remembered another one. When I lost my first tooth, I was concerned by the “black spot” that showed in the gum. My mother told me not to worry, it was just a blood clot. Less than a week later, she went to take a casserole over to a friend of the family who’s father had just died. I was bored and rambunctious, so she told me to wait in the car, she’d only be a minute.

It was dark, and to stall her from leaving, I asked, “What’d he die of?” Just before she hipped the truck door closed, both hands full of casserole, she said, “A blood clot.” It probably was NOT four hours later, but it FELT like four hours, before she came back to find me sobbing hysterically about being too young to die.

And what’s up with everyone yelling “JOKE THEFT” at some of these? Do you seriously think no one else has ever had comparable thoughts, or that sitcom writers live in a vacuum? (Taking it personally because of how many times I’ve done a “ME TOO!” doubletake at the TV screen, only to be accused of “stealing the joke” later. Come on!)

Also I had my son half-convinced my car had an ejection-seat button until he was like 12. He was pretty sure I was lying but didn’t want to risk it. It was the only way I could get him to leave the radio on the station I liked.

Lastly, to the plural-penis-provider above, you’re correct that the proper Latin plural is penes, but in English (including the medical field), penises is okay. I had to mention that because your commented reminded me of the last comment I’m going to make here I SWEAR:

I also had a come-to-logic moment involving a Terry Pratchett reference; I’d been reading the books for years, seeing the joke in book after book and not getting it. Then one day, out of the blue, it clicked. It’s too complicated to explain; suffice to to say that I was driving down the freeway all by myself and suddenly blurted out loud, “IT’S THE PENISES! Oh my God – it’s that – they are – because – IT’S THE PENISES!” and began laughing my head off. If anyone had been riding with me, I’m sure they’d have thought I was having a seizure or something.

I was out of law school and working in a corporate law department before I realized that La Jolla, CA was prounounced La Hoya. Talk about embarassing when I asked a senior lawyer for the lajolla lease file.

I thought deer could only cross at the deer crossing signs. Also, I was raised Catholic and just recently learbed before the reading of the Gospel we say Peace Be With You. I’ve been saying Pleased to Meet You all tbese years.

When I was probably about 8 years old, I told my whole extended family an AWESOME blonde joke I’d heard (where did I even hear this? I have no idea). “Why didn’t the blonde like using her vibrator? Because it chipped her teeth.” I was expecting uproarious laughter at this clearly hilarious joke, but it was met with stunned silence. Finally, my dad recovered enough to ask me what I thought a vibrator was. Turns out I thought the joke was referring to the vibrating massager pad my dad used for his bad back, and that the blonde had just turned it up really high so it vibrated her whole body and made her teeth click together.

There was a lot of relieved laughter when my family realized I wasn’t an 8-year-old pervert.

I used to think that left and right were opposite for boys and girls. I think because at one point, the idea of right and left was explained to me by a boy who was facing me.

Oh! My daughter (6) told me she thought the Katy Perry song (Last Friday Night) talks about “candy dipping in the dark.” I then got to explain about skinny dipping, to which she responded, “they’re NAKED?!?” Hehehe

So my mom asked me if I’d like angel wings. I enthusiastically said yes!!! What child doesn’t want wings to wear. I was convinced I could be a fairy! Sadly she was actually talking about bangs. I’ve never hurt so much since!

Also, I had my daughter convinced for quite some time that I really had eyes in the back of my head. She’d ask me about something in the car, and when I said I couldn’t see she’d tell me to “use the eyes in the back of your head!” I ‘d respond that “I have to use my forward facing eyes to drive, and I can’t use both at the same time.” LOL

“I have no idea. I sort of spent all week yelling about how much I hate Rick Perry.” Make it up to us? That’s been my favorite way to spend the evening this week. How could we possibly parlay our hatred into a drinking game? I was just glad to hear that Wendy Davis and I weren’t the only women in Texas trying to keep the republicans out of our reproductive organs.

I had a guy friend in highschool (HIGHSCHOOL!) who asked if we girls were nervous to be around needles or anything sharp. When we asked him why, he explained the obvious: milk would spurt out of our boobs if we were pricked. As if boobs were, at all times, milk-filled water balloons.

I used to love singing along to the U2 song “she moves in a Serious Way” – as a kid I thought guys must find serious women sexy. As opposed to mysterious women.

I thought that pineapples grew on trees (like coconuts) until I went to Hawaii (in my 30s) and visited the Dole plantation. I swear, I walked around in a daze all day saying “Pineapples grow from the ground? REALLY????” I still can’t quite believe it!

I missed the Twitter party, but I thought you’d want to know that when I learned the Pledge of Allegiance in kindergarten, I envisioned 4 witches, clad in black, selling lemonade, every time we repeated, “…for which it stands…”.

A friend of mine was finally called out on Facebook last year when she typed “Chester Drawers” and then somebody took pity on her and explained it to her.

My sister, when she was learning to read, would sound out street signs while my parents were driving. My dad almost wrecked after hearing her say “Come-FART Inn” from the back seat. And the local hair salon “Aileen’s” was “Aliens”.

My other sister- the song that goes “It’s the stuff that dreams are made of…”? was “stuff that green tomato.”

I still laugh at those old TV commercials about “Pour some shook up ramen!” (“Pour some sugar on me”) and “Rock the Cat Box” (Rock the Casbah).

Saw someone mention the “dawnzerly light”. Remember that bit in “Ramona”? “Yeah, Beezus, turn on the dawnzer!” and then they had to explain to poor Ramona that the “dawnzer lee light” was not, in fact, someone singing about a lamp.

Roy Orbison wasn’t blind. I thought so too. But what’s really sad is that he wore the huge glasses because some asshole told him he was too ugly to be a singer.

My college roommate thought that the line “the truth will come to you at last” from Stairway to Heaven was “a Jew will bother you a lot” and wouldn’t listen to Led Zeppelin because she thought they were anti-Semites.

My husband’s grandmother (who is 85) still thinks that the worst job in the world is to have to be the guy who sticks the money through the holes in the ATM.

I was once sent to the auto parts store by my cousins to buy blinker fluid. And I went to three places before I figured it out.

Whenever I was in trouble as a little girl my mom would yell “Sara Ruthann!” I didn’t know until I turned 16 and needed my birth certificate to get a drivers license that my name was actually Sara Ruth. To this day she’ll still yell Sara Ruthann. I have no idea where the Ann came from.

Oh, and a friend’s son totally did the “No, mommy, I just want one chee” thing when he was little. She (the English major) said “Ok. You can have A PIECE OF CHEESE.” but he still didn’t get it. We still laugh about how clever he was!

When I was a kid, I believed that the emergency broadcast signals they’re mandated to play on the radio were actually aliens making contact and that the fuzzy, “If this was an actual emergency…” voice at the end of the signals was the aliens breaking through. To this day, emergency broadcast signals give me the creeps.

Until I was about 22 or 23, I did not understand why you were not allowed to follow construction trucks (the ones with the “do not follow” sign on them). I thought I was supposed to change lanes when one of them would be in front of me on the road because I couldn’t follow it.

My mother is cheap and never buys hangers so we always use the wire hangers from the cleaners. Until I went to college I didn’t know that people actually bought (or even could buy) hangers. I didn’t know what people did before they brought their clothes to be cleaned and began to accumulate wire hangers…

When my sister was little she thought that old people changed their names when they got older. She, never having known a Gloria, asked my Grandma Gloria what her name was when she was little.

1- I also thought the “No Outlet” signs meant that there were no power outlets allowed in the houses in those places. The neighborhood I grew up in at the time had loads of families with young kids and we all played out in the street on all the various dead end streets. When I was around 5-6 for some reason there was an upswing in traffic trying to use our neighborhood as a cut thru. So the HOA got the city to put up “No Outlet” signs on both entrances. When I saw them for the first time I got very upset I was going to miss my saturday morning cartoons when they cam and took away all the outlets in our house.

2- The AC/DC song. When my youngest brother was young and heard that song on the radio he was convinced that the line was “Dirty Deeds and Dundo cheats”. He thought Dundo was a guy that the band knew that cheated when playing board games and they were warning everybody.

3- When I worked at a movie theater myself and a few other employees pulled an old gag on one of the guys that worked there. We convinced him that the drinking fountain was fed by a tank that was in the wall and it had to be periodically refilled by dumping buckets of water down the drain. After about half an hour he asked if it was full yet. I told him it was probably enough to last a week or so. So every thursday for the next month and a half he (without being told to do it) would get a bucket and fill the drinking fountain for around half an hour. Finally one thursday one of the other managers was working instead of me and asked him what the hell he was doing. When he explained the drinking fountain needed to be refilled the manager laughed for at least 10 minutes. The guy was like 25.

My grandparents took us to the racetrack quite often when we were kids. The first time I picked a winner, I thought I got to bring the horse home. I was sad that my parents hadn’t thought to bring along a horse trailer.

Along the lines of the controversial GunPoint, when I was a wee lass I thought “Pontius Pilate” was a place, under which Jesus was crucified. Talk about making the scariest thing imaginable even more horrifying… put it underground.

Also last month I had to explain the difference between “sedentary” and “sedimentary” to my 55 year old mother, who thought that it was “sedimentary” because rocks don’t move much… I pointed out other types of rocks don’t move a whole lot either

I have found my people. Especially Julie, who made me feel better only because she is just a little older than me and still didn’t know the MB song. Until two minutes ago I thought it was “Knights,” althought I thought it might have some connection to the Monty Python knights skit – doesn’t everything eventually end up at Python?

The funny thing is, when I started reading the post, I thought immediately of the “Big Old Jet Airliner” (for me it was “Jingle Jan and Alina” (whoever THEY were ) – and just a few points down, there it was!!

Until my family ridiculed me for saying it out loud (when I was in my late 20s), I thought that if a hair fell out of your head it could root again in another pore on your body. So, if a hair fell onto your arm it could re-root and grow again. People just laugh and laugh when I tell this story, but I still mostly believe that could happen.

My dad told us growing up how creamed corn was made: they take cobs of corn to the old folks’ home, have the old people take out their dentures, gum off the corn kernels, kinda sorta chew, and then spit it into a can. I was done with creamed corn then.

Gramps also told me that the raisins in cinnamon raisin bread were actually dead flies. It kept me from eating his favorite bread.

I had to google The Moody Blues too. And even though I know it was Secret Agent Man, I’ve always sang it secret Asian man. But my personal experience with misheard lyrics was when I was little. I thought Kenny Rogers was singing “You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille, with four hundred children and a crop in the field.” I remember thinking, “That’s a lot of kids… I would have left too.”

Unrelated to music, I used to work with a girl who sincerely thought that a germophobe had a fear of Germans.

Oh, and my Aunt Bridget, who is only a few years older than me, convinced me that tapioca pudding was really just fish eyes in glue. I ABSOLUTELY refused to eat it until my mom threatened to ground me. It turns out a REALLY like fish eyes in glue, I mean, tapioca pudding.

When I was little, I thought a divorce was a big deal because you had to invite all the same people who came to your wedding. There would be a whole ceremony and at the end you got to stop holding hands. Like a wedding in reverse.

You have no idea how many times I’ve called my mom (who knew that Roy Orbison wasn’t blind, just thought it was funny that I did so ‘just never told me’) to list of names of people who thought so too.
I don’t know what I’ve accomplished there, but it kinda feels good.

1. I didn’t know Roy Orbison wasn’t blind.
2. I too thought it was Knights in White Satin (I thought it was about romantic Knights) until I just Googled it.
3. I had no idea Snails weren’t slugs with shells. I still have to go confirm this in Google for myself.
4. I didn’t know Pineapples didn’t grow on trees until just this very minute.

I am 42 and have a Master’s Degree. I teach Children. Sorry people. How did I get through college
(twice) not learning these things?

I had no idea that people believed that the stories in the bible were true. I thought they were just stories, like all of the other books my parents read me at bed time. As for church I thought we just happened to go to the church that talked about Bible stories. I didn’t like going to church and had decided that when I grew up I was going to the church that talked about Dr. Seuss stories.

I’ve tweeted these but they are things I actually believe when I was young.
When I was about 6, I moved into a 3-story house. I kept asking to hear the stories and no one would tell me. ?#disappointed?
For awhile, I thought hawk was spelled H A U U K. I was told it was H A double-U K. Me: But I put 2 U’s in!
I believed my mother’s best-friend, whom I never met, was named Hoosie, because she was always saying “Hoosie down the street said …”
What do wood bees have that is so valuable? Wood bee thief arrested!
When I started first grade, I thought a car pool was a swimming pool you drove around. In hot weather that might be OK, but getting wet in cold weather going to school sounded like a really bad idea. How silly of me. It’s a pool for cars!

My husband also asked me once to make him cupcakes, so I sent him to the baking aisle to pick out a mix. When I found him there a few minutes later he said “there’s all these cake mixes, but none for cupcakes”. HA! I asked him “honey, where to cupcakes come from?” and he stormed off. He’s actually a very smart professional man, and it made it all the more hilarious.

When I was very young I wanted to be a Girl Scout. For some reason I thought G.Scouts had tattoos, that looked like badges. So while my parents were in another room I drew badges all over myself with permanent markers.

Ok, one more because no one’s mentioned it yet, and I know of at least one of my friends who thought the same as me:
The ditty “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy” was always “Marsey Dotes and Dosey Dotes and little Lambsey Divey” in my head… I always wondered who they were and why people sang about them. I think I finally figured out what it actually said a few years ago. I’m 33.

When I was about 5 or 6 and we would fly to visit my grandparents, I would eagerly look out the plane window to see the angels that lived on top of the clouds – since obviously that’s where heaven is. I really wanted to wave at them.

I replied yesterday on Twitter but for some reason none of my replies to your posts seem to show up. I am starting to think I am Tweetarded.

For years we have teased my husband’s best friend Wendy about the fact that until they told her in her mid-twenties that Alaska was actually attached she had no idea. She honestly believed it was an island like Hawaii because of how Alaska and Hawaii are shown on a lot of maps. Our mutual friend Lee added insult to injury by asking her if she really believed that the Army Corps of Engineers was so skilled that they managed to make one side of the “island” of Alaska perfectly straight.

Whenever we would get together this funny story inevitably came up. We all just thought Wendy was moderately special until a few years ago when we had a party at our house with some new friends of my son’s and some of my co-workers. It turned out that there were two more women at the party, one in her late forties and one in her late fifties who thought the exact same thing, until that night.

When my son was very young we attended a church that was very into street preaching and all of the pastors liked to shout, a lot. They also all used handheld microphones and would pace back and forth on the stage. Somewhere along the way we bought him a blue, red and yellow plastic microphone. For months afterwards he would get up on the coffee table in his diaper and preach a sermon just like the pastors would. He would walk back and forth on the table, waving his hands and telling people to get saved. When he was done he would start singing in a very serious voice, with his little eyes closed and waving his hands like all the adults did at church. He always sang the exact same song “Amazing Grapes…” 🙂

As a small child my Grandfather needed to keep my mother busy, and told her she had to feed the snapdragons so they wouldn’t die. You did this by pinching their “cheeks” to open their mouths, and inserting a bit of bread… she fed them for hours.. more than once…

Mine: I was very tiny as a child, my best friend was MUCH taller than me. I asked my mom why, and she replied that it was because my friend had tall genes. So I went over and borrowed a pair of her jeans so I could be tall too. 😀

I’m one of those parents that told their children things… like that the round hay bales were ‘cow cocoons’ I still laugh when I think about them getting excited in the car when we saw any! Many times they had hatched… you would see cows & calves around them 😉

At a restaurant with about 10 of our friends, my best friend admitted that she used to think the lyrics were, “You’ll never be my pizza burning” and she was so glad when she clued in that the actual lyrics were, “You’ll never be my pink Suburban.”

When I was a kid, I always thought the “Pass With Care” signs on the highway meant that you should try to think kindly about the people you were passing. Like the highway department wanted us to empathize with each other more, or something.

I thought my Mom’s youngest sister’s name was Annie Annie instead of Aunt Ann, and furthermore could not understand why Gradma gave the rest of her daughters “Ant” as a first name. Because bugs were gross.

I have two:
My parents are named Howie and Carol and I thought our faucets had their initials on them. And the medicine commercials on tv always said “use as directed”. But then they didn’t give directions so I didn’t know how anyone knew how to take it.
Also, when I tolfd my sister about this blog, her first words were “you have found your people”! Very glad I did.

I thought “park and rides” were amusement parks that had rides – and didn’t know how I was missing so many amusement parks!! I realized this wasn’t the case about 4 or 5 years ago…when i was 25/26. Oy.

I used to think a cardigan was a purse because someone said she’d lost one and “good thing there was nothing in it”. I thought the Autobahn was a race track, which was spelled Audubon.

In high school my friends said the way to check if spaghetti was done is to throw it against a wall. I asked, “How are you supposed to eat it if it’s all against the wall?” After they stopped rolling with laughter they said, “Just one piece!”

Yesterday at a festival, I overheard two girls reading the sign in the bathroom that “This is a no smoking FACULTY” and one of the girls said “Hunh, I never knew a bathroom was called a FACULTY” and the other said- “See, you learn something new every day”. And I SO wanted to point out that it was actually a FACILITY and that what they should learn was to read, but I try really hard not to be an asshole to children ( well, teenagers) they have enough problems!

I have visited a website called iusedtobelieve.com, which may or may not still exist.

My favorite quote on that site was under the category of religion: “When I was a child, I used to believe that the entire universe had been made by a great white-bearded man who lived in the sky, and that all he worried about, day in and day out, was what I was doing with my penis.”

Wow – 43 years old and a trivia buff – and I’ve just been enlightened as to Knights in White Satin and Roy Orbison!

When I was 10, I ripped off my mattress tag that was bugging me. I barely slept for a week, waiting to be hauled away.

When I was 22, I was completely convinced my best friend was lying that she had made some maple syrup – I was actually searching her garbage for the empty bottle. Neither of us could believe the other was serious.

Until I was 30, I couldn’t understand the signs in MN that said “2 person car pools only” for lanes. Why couldn’t a carpool with 3 or more use it? It seemed so unfair!!

Finally, no one else in my life has appreciated how funny I find it that we have “Jiffy Lube” and its competitor – “Rapid Oil Change.”

occasionally a reception would list “crudites” which I would read in my head as “crude-ites” I was always curious what it was but am always late for things and would only see a veggie-and-dip platter. I imagined they were toasted bread and a topping, like crostini (which Google just informed me is NOT crustini as I have thought until this very moment).

I had also always heard the word “Crew-dih-tay” and had no idea what it was other than a fancy appetizer.

Six months ago I put it together: crudites (crew-dih-tay): a veggie tray.

Until I was 23 I pronounced gestures “guess-tures” because of the game “Guesstures” which we played pretty often in my family. I would never had know that I was pronouncing it wrong if my boyfriend hadn’t asked me if I was “being cute” or if I truly didn’t know how to say it. To this day (and I’m 30 now) I still have to think really hard before I say the word and will usually avoid it all together in conversation if I can.

My dad told me that Soy Sauce was made of squished bugs and that’s why it was black. We still call it bug juice to this day. Doesn’t phase me until I go somewhere for supper and ask if they have any bug juice!

When she was younger, her dad used to tell her that the ice cream truck only played its music to let people know when they were sold out of ice cream. She could never figure out why they always seemed to run out before they made it to her street.

When I was in grade school, back in the last century, we had Kotex machines in the bathrooms at our very small country school. During PTA meetings the kids were allowed to roam the school, play in the gym or playground, unsupervised (People did that in the last century) My friend Patty and I decided to find out what exactly was in those white boxes hanging on the wall, went into the PTA meeting and asked our Moms for the nickel needed –I guess to get rid of us, they gave it to us and asked no questions. The machine dispensed this oblong box– and when we opened it them, we decided these cool pads were knee pads for the volley ball players and excitedly took them into the PTA meeting to show our Moms! I can still see the look of utter panic on my Mom’s face as she grabbed the sanitary napkin from me and stuffed it in her purse!

When I was in elementary school, I thought the the “Merge Left” signs meant that my beloved Aunt Marge was somehow along the left side of the road. I always looked for her and she was never there, so just figured that I looked out the wrong side.

I loved reading these.
My stories:
I have a good friend named Lad, who lives in Seattle.
After i returnef from a long weekend visit to see Lad, my daughter, four at the time,
asked me “did you See your friend “Attle?” Poor kid.

My own – when I was in fourth grade, my BFF and I loved the song Abracadabra.
We thought the line “black panties with an angels face” referred to the design of the underwear and thought it was SO gross.

When I was little my dolly had two of those disappearing bottles, one with milk and one with juice. This led me to believe that women’s breasts were the same, one producing milk and one juice. My mom was so confused when I asked her which of hers was for juice.

Yay, I thought of one about a childhood friend named Erika. We were watching ‘Rosanne’ one day and Rosanne said, ‘God bless America,’ (like in a tone you would say a curse word) and Erika was all, ‘Oh my gosh, how in the world did that saying catch on so that even Rosanne is saying it on TV?!’ and I’m all, ‘What?’
Then through some conversation the following was revealed: Erika’s mother used to always say, ‘God bless America,’ in that same cursing tone, but Erika though she was saying, ‘God bless ’em, Erika.’
So I could understand her confusion.

When Marineland first opened ‘Friendship Cove’ and played that horrible commercial nonstop my best friend thought the lyrics were: friendship CALLED Marineland…instead I’d friendship COVE Marineland. To this day I tease her about our long lasting Marineland.

Also, when we were little my brother thought the ‘no outlet’ signs meant that all the people who lived in that street didn’t have any outlets to plug in their electronics. He told us he felt so bad for those people and couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to live there.

For the longest time, I thought the first line of Brown Eyed Girl was “hey, Roderigo.” I also thought that the line later in the song was “gunnin’ down the old man with a transistor radio.”

When I was little, we had an album of traditional/patriotic songs. I thought the first verse of Battle Hymn of the Republic was:

My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the village where the grapes of wrath are stored
He hath loosed the faithful lightning of his terrible Swiss sword

To this day when I hear or sing this song, the visual in my mind is of giant man wearing robes and a long white beard stomping Godzilla-like through an Alpine village, carrying a huge sword that has lightning coming out of the blade.

When I was a kid I thought the lyrics to Ramblin Man by the Allman Brothers Band were “lord I was born in Bethlehem” I was about 10 when my parents finally figured out what I was singing. We didn’t go to church so who knows where I got my lyrics from but 15 years later we all laugh whenever this song comes on. I don’t think I’m ever gonna live it down.

Am I the only one who thought it was “I believe in mail call” instead of “I believe in miracles”?
My dad had me convinced they were saying the name wrong on TV, & it was “Bullmoose the Winkle” instead of Bullwinkle the Moose.
Also, due to faulty attention, I have been offered the chance to watch & do the “MST3K” thing on mouseturd movies of the cheesy variety.
Brother in law had one grandson convinced there had been dinosaurs called “suckasaurus” that lived in the Puget Sound region, & they had webbed feet.

Of course, dyslexia has a lot to answer for, as any dim blub can tell you.

You know those bumps they put in parking lots to slow you down…. “speed bumps?” My grandpa use to call them dead policemen… and I swear he once told me that it was because that was where they buried policemen when they died so they could still stop traffic…. Totally believed him for years because…well… he was awesome… I miss him 🙂

Cam-Totally with you in the Marsey Dotes. I was in my 20’s before I figured that one out.
My husband’s aunt (in her 50s at the time) called my mother in law one day and asked how to prepare “buh-nels.” It had to be explained to her that BNLS was an abbreviation for boneless.
My husband, when he was younger, really believed that TJ Maxx was “never the same place twice” and couldn’t figure out how they could switch out a whole store that quickly.
I am guilty of the knights in white satin thing.
I’m a pre-K teacher, most of my students begin the year thinking elemenop is a letter. Sometimes they get really mad when the can’t find one specific symbol for it on the alphabet chart.

Ok…so when I was growing up, we used to spend the summer with my grandparents in Spain. I tried to learn Spanish but I think I was hindered by the fact that until I was about 8, I was convinced that everyone really thought in English, and the people in Spain just spoke Spanish as a sort of secret club thing…

When I was dating my husband, who was in the navy reserves, he told me whenever he was standing guard he had to salute the phone because they didn’t know who was calling. He let me think that for a whole year.

He also tried to convince that you could get your driver’s license at Sears. He couldn’t quite get me to believe him but I have to admit he almost had me.

Last but not least he got some safety glasses and told me they were his new glasses and let me believe that until I told him I wouldn’t go out with him unless took them off.

When I was about 5, I thought everyone had a maximum number of words they were allowed to speak in their lifetimes, so I was very quiet as a child since I didn’t want to use up all my words before I died.

At the same age, I also thought that if I could see people on the TV, then they could see me — so I would change clothes behind the couch.

Wait..it’s not knights in white satin?! Wtf? What is it then?
And I once told a friend all stop signs with white borders were stoptional. She believed me until a cop corrected her.
While married to my ex I managed to convince him all black skunks were the skunk version of albino. I’m not sure if there are all black skunks. I’m pretty sure for the next week he was calling black cats albino skunks though.

One day I came home from school proudly proclaiming that I didn’t have any feelings. My mom was horrified at what my teacher was teaching me and thinking that I would now have to spend years in therapy. It wasn’t until later that night when she was cleaning out my backpack that she found a notice that we had had a visit from a dentist. I guess when combining Texan and 5 year old, some things get lost in translation.

When I was about 3 my dad babysat one afternoon while my mom went out. Dad’s version of “watching” me was to make sure the doors were closed. While he read the paper I asked him of he would play tea party? Sure, whatever. So I brought one of my tea cups of “tea”. After the third or fourth “cup of tea” my Dad started to wonder where the short person was getting the water. He followed my voice to the bathroom where I was dipping “tea” out of the toilet. He never played tea party again.

He got even. When I was in kindergarten during show and tell I told everyone it was my Dad’s birthday. Teacher asked how old he was, so I told her what he told me…16. I was so angry when she told me that wasn’t possible. Like my Dad would lie to me.

When I was learning to drive (16 yrs old), my brother knew I didn’t understand cars very well and he loved messing with my head. I was asking him about the different windshield wiper speeds and he convinced me that the intermittent setting was actually counting the number of raindrops on the windshield before it would wipe. Brothers can be assholes.

I agree, what else would you call a knee-pit? Or an elbow-pit for that matter.

When I was a kid, there was this train sculpture on the wall of the room I shared with my brother. One of the train cars said “Pennsylvania” (as in the railroad line). I was learning to read at the time and decided that the word must be “penny- Sah-laa-vin-ah.” It took a few years to get it right, but I was the only kid in my class that could spell Pennsylvania when it appeard on a spelling test.

When I was a kid, I had to leave home by “twenty-to” (meaning 8:40) to get to school on time… but I always heard it as “twenty-two”, and figured it was just some weird system of measuring time I wasn’t too familiar with.

I remember once I was running late, and it was my parent’s fault this time… and I looked at the clock, counted up the minutes to see how late we were, and told my dad “we have to hurry up! It’s already thirty-six!” (Because it was 14 minutes after “twenty-two”).

* It’s NOT Knights in White Satin? My world is now shattered. So much for a bunch of knights secure in their masculinity !!

* I feel SO much better knowing now that the blinded by the light song isn’t really talking about douches!!! That has always bugged me, because he says it like eight billion times in that song!

* Pineapples DON’T grow on trees????? Whaaaaat???? How the hell did I made it to 40 never knowing that?? I had to Google it just now, and still don’t quite believe it… LOL!

* FINALLY, I now know who the hell “Marsey Dotes” and her friend “Lambsey Divey” are! That has always bugged me.

* Personally, I think “Sexy Asian Man” is more fun.

And one I haven’t seen yet… Until just a couple of years ago, when I finally forced myself to go look up the lyrics, I always heard “whisper ‘Anne Heche'” (instead of “whisper and hush”) in the song “Moondance”. I actually still hear it that way. Now it just makes me giggle instead of wondering how a song that old could be mentioning Anne Heche. LOL 🙂

Another one I haven’t seen here yet… Many many years ago I saw a comedian do a bit about misunderstood song lyrics. Until then, I could listen to Purple Haze just fine. Now, all I can hear is “excuse me, while I kiss this fly”.

My dad always thought the Katy Perry song “waking up in Vegas” was actually “that’s what you get for breaking up on Facebook”

My Mom used to think that “Low Rider” was a PSA against drinking and driving: “don’t. Drive. Drunk…”

And as for me, in addition to many things already mentioned above, I thought when counting past 100 you only had to get to 12 (like telling time) before moving on to the next hundred, like 111… 112… 200!

For a while growing up, we had milk delivered (by Adohr Farms) in a little white truck. Occasionally, a brown delivery truck would stop next door. I thought that UPS was delivering them CHOCOLATE milk.

My friend thought until she was an adult that an artichoke was an animal because once she came to our house and my mom was eating dinner and she asked, “What are you eating?” and my mom told her “the heart of an artichoke.” Also, I believe the lyrics are “Bingo Jet had a light on” for Steve Miller Band.

I used to think the signs for ‘steep hill’ with the picture of a truck on a slope and no words, meant “Bandits ahead” – I thought the wheels were the eyes and the triangle for the hill was the handkerchief covering the mouth.

Also, I don’t know the “nights in white satin” song but I keep hearing it as “Knights in white satin with blue satin sashes…”

I used to think Queens Bohemian Rhapsody was ‘beelzebub has a devil for a sideboard’. And that’s what I would sing. Out. Loud.
I also had a heated argument with my English teacher about the word crazy. I was convinced it was spelt Krazy. I brought my comic into school the next day to prove to her that her dictionary was wrong.

Um. Two tall tales from my granddad: Sheep who live on mountains have shorter legs on the right hand side of their bodies than the left, so they can stand up straight. I used to worry so about what would happen if they wanted to turn round, imagining sheep rolling down mountains like giant fluffy bowling balls… Number two – who remembers Concorde? The world’s first ever passenger plane to fly above the speed of sound. Which meant that, according to my granddad, all the seats faced the rear of the plane so that they could hear each other speak. My curious nature meant that I spent hours daydreaming about how the pilot could see where he was going.
And I have so many of the ‘what, it’s NOT that way’ stories. I recall as an 11 year old girl telling my friend that men’s penises worked like a biro pen – that the bit at the end was a ball which rolled round to let urine out. I believed it wholeheartedly. There are way too many of these! My favourite misheard lyric has to be from ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen. I believed that ‘Beelzebub has a devil for a sideboard free’. I shall go now!

When I was young, since the only people I knew of who died were Jesus and the two thieves next to him (my family didn’t talk about death around kids), I thought that was how everybody went — your neighbors got sick of your shit and nailed you to a tree.

I used to think that the sun and moon were the same thing.. The sun was on one side, the moon on the other.. Until one day, I saw the moon and the sun at the same time. It totally blew my mind. And I thought when selling a house, the person getting your house, gave you theirs. So, like a trade…

4 stories:
I’m 36 and was absolutely certain that narwhals were mythical unicorn whales until last Christmas when my husband mentioned a friend wanted to buy a spear made of narwhal horn (while we watched Elf). My husband had a hard time convincing me they are real. I refused to believe such a preposterous creature was real until I saw actual video footage of living ones!

My best friend told me when she was in Italy she told a friend: ” These kids are so smart, they all speak Italian!”

My family was once leaving the airport from the fourth floor of the building when my sister saw the elevator indicators, which were round instead of arrows. The down indicator was on. She thought we needed to find another elevator because this one only went to the third floor…

Lastly, I once felt compelled to call a radio station because all the morning show hosts were talking about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table like it was history. They thought I was the crazy one when I told them it was a legend. He told me he was looking at the actual round table on the internet and I had to explain that people made objects based on the legend and it wasn’t a historical artifact. I promised him it wasn’t real and I still don’t think he believed me…

I just realized just last year (I’m 31) that the sound of thunder IS ACTUALLY THE SOUND OF LIGHTNING! Until then, I just thought thunder and lightning were separate things that happened at the same time during a thunderstorm. *facepalm*

My granddad had me convinced of several things: the great wall of China was supposed to have a roof on it and they were getting the materials from Egypt but they fell out and the Pyramids are the left over bricks that didn’t get used.

Spiders ears are in their knees which he proved to me by finding a spider clapping his hands and watching it run away then recapturing it pulling its legs off and clapping his hands, the spider didn’t run away because it couldnt hear the clapping, it took me a while to figure it out.

Cats eyes in the road were turned on by a leprechaun running in front of the car and there was a second one riding on the back bumper turning them off, they took turns at running.

I also thought crysanthamum was a really bad swear word. Don’t get me started on desecrated coconut

Possibly because I watched too much Emergency! and Adam-12 too young, I got arrest and cardiac arrest mixed up, so I thought when police arrested people, they threw them to the ground and performed CPR on them.

In Taylor Swift’s Song “22” I was sure that the first line was, “Dressed up like hamsters” as in the TV commercials for KIAs where fun loving hamsters ride around in cars. So much more fun to think about dressing like hamsters than dressing like hipsters.

I have a friend who knew the word ‘pup tent’ and misheard the word cupcake as ‘pup’ cake. Ergo, ‘pup’ is the proper prefix for anything that is a small version of the object. Pupcake = small cake, Pupbike = her small bike, Pupcat = kitten. She said that even after her mother explained it to her she didn’t believe it.

I haven’t decided if these made my morning or ruined my life.
In the Lord’s Prayer, Give us this day our daily bread, I believed that the Wonder bread delivery truck brought the bread and Deliver us from evil, meant that the UPS truck was responsible for this.

Put me down as another one who thought it was “Knights in White Satin,” up until yesterday when I read this post. In my defense, however, my first boyfriend told me that the song was actually a veiled account about the KKK. He’s white, I’m black, who was I to argue?

I spent a summer in Washington DC at American University. I had several classmates convinced that (because I was from a dinky West Texas town) everyone rode their horses to school and that the 4H kids took care of them for class credit.

As a child I thought that if a recipe called for egg whites you put the shell in the bowl. My son used to sing Jack fell down and broke his crayon, but better my daughter thought the B-52s were singing “hurry up and bring your juicebox money” to the Love Shack.

My mother once encouraged me to stand on my toes for a balloon that was out of my reach. I looked at her like she was crazy. She insisted, so I plopped one foot on top of the other and reached for the balloon again, showing her just how stupid she was.

As a child in the 70’s I would enthusiastically shake my foot under the table to KC & The Sunshine Band’s “Shake Your Booty”. Friends continue to be stunned that there was a time I did not know what “booty” meant. Also, The Police song “King of Pain” was an angsty adolescent fave because I thought the lyric was “bless my soul I’m weird” and I was, indeed, weird (for the record, it’s “that’s my soul up there”).

My husband apparently never thought some thing incorrectly as he hasn’t found this nearly as funny I I have. And by funny I really mean, oh, I totally see how they got that. I thought I was the only person who even KNEW the Mares Eat Oats song because my grandmother sang it to me. I had never really thought about how pineapples grow, and went and looked it up. Eye-opening! Kenny Rogers did have confusing lyrics–400 hundred children & crap in the field as well as islands in the STREET.
My husband is disturbed that there are more people like ME in the world. I think we just know how to make life fun.

@Andi 449,
You may or may not be delighted to know that in Iliad Book 22, Achilles kills Hector by spearing him through the throat, but that Hector can still talk because the spear passes “right by his larynx” (para ton aspharagon). As a former Classicist, I swear on my Cunliffe’s Homeric Lexicon that I am not making this up.

Until college, I thought the Journey song ‘Open Arms’ actually went like this: So now I come to you/With broken arms. Somehow, it made it even more romantic since, you know, he’d broken both of his arms but was still struggling to be with her. I imagined him like one of those people you only ever see in movies who have both of their arms in casts and they’re up parallel with their shoulders and supported by posts running down to their torso. I used to picture him lurching toward her with his arms perpetually open to her (ironically), just begging for her love. Super, super romantic.

I thought all girls had “PeePees” and that when they went through puberty, it turned into a “Vagina”. I mentioned being afraid of “growing a vagina” when I spread this “truth” to dozens of my early elementary friends.

WHen I was a kid, I believed that the radio worked exactly like a tape player. If you turned it off right as your favorite song came on, you could turn it back on whenever you were ready to listen to it (you just couldn’t rewind it – my confusion only went so far…) I can’t count how many people I yelled at for messing up my “stored songs”.

“I thought there was some central location where people monitored traffic and switched the lights from green to red.” ~ @barbaramcthomas
“I thought snails were slugs who found homes.” ~ @LaurenCentrella
“I thought Christ was Jesus’ last name. Mary Christ. Joseph Christ.” ~stateofchangekc

I used to think that a radio worked much like a cassette player. You could turn it off just as your favorite song came on, and it would still be there, stored, for when you wanted to listen to it later. (I did not think it could be rewound – my delusion only went so far). I can’t count how many people I yelled at for messing up my “stored songs”.

I thought the signs on the interstate that say “Illegal to cross median” said “Illegal to cross Meridian.” To get to my grandmother’s house, we had to go through a city named Meridian. My dad would tell me that we were going to risk it and to “watch for cops.”

My sister also told me that if you flushed the toilet while you were sitting on it, you would have to tinkle all over again.

I used to believe cows married horses… and dogs married cats. Made sense to me as a child and STILL KINDA DOES. I love the tribe comment. I saw that one on Twitter. A coworker recently used that term to describe a pod of people she can trust with her relationship stories and shared interests, myself included. It’s an honor to be part of someone’s tribe. I am part of your tribe, too, Jenny, from the moment my husband gifted me your book… all through my laughing till crying about the cow and your arm stuck in her vagina… and to now. I told my husband you taught me not to fear writing real truths about oneself. We hear your unique voice. You continue to inspire with all your irreverence, wit, and the rays of you bursting between words. Rock on, Bloggess.

I also thought that the song, “Forever in Blue Jeans” was “The Reverend Blue Jeans” and that he was like…this cool reverend, who was really hip to the kids of today, and wore blue jeans. I always imagined he’d be hot.

I was watching Celebrity Apprentice, and in disgust I said about Lou Ferrigno, “What nationality IS he?!” because of his speech… My fiance looks at me and says, “Deaf. Lou Ferrigno is deaf.” I had no idea.

This is great. I probably should have compiled my posts better. I also thought it was “Knights in White Satin” (In fact, I looked it up just now, to make sure that it really wasn’t). I also thought Roy Orbison was blind…pretty much until just now (although my husband told me that he wasn’t once, I think). I also have the need to define “few, couple, and several” and I pretty much define them as the poster above does. I’ve also spent a lot of my lifetime believing that birds always live in nests. I learned they don’t sometime in my 20s.

In the feminine hygiene department (hope this isn’t too much info), my mom did a bad job of explaining a tampon to me, because she hoped I wouldn’t use them. When the time came, I bought one at school and looked at it with momentary confusion before deciding that it should be taken out of the wrapper…and the applicator…then I decided, “Okay, I guess I just put this in my underwear, then?” And I did. Needless to say, it wasn’t particularly effective.

Misheard lyrics from myself or my friends:
Orinoco Flow: Instead of “Sail Away, Sail Away, Sail Away” I have an ex who bellowed, “Save the Whales! Save the Whales! Save the Whales!” I still can’t hear the song without hearing the wrong lyrics.

Runaround: Now, this one is odd, but my stepsister used to hear, instead of, “What’s yours and mine, the fishing’s fine” she heard, “What’s yours and mine…think she farted.” And, even though it doesn’t look right when you type it out, listen to the song. You’ll hear it! You really will!

Kyrie Eleison: Someone once told me about their misheard lyrics. Instead of “Kyrie Eleison down the road that I must travel,” they heard, “Carry a laser down the road that I must travel!” And…well…why not? It would help you see things and ward off evil, wouldn’t it? I sing it all the time, now.

When I was about 16, my mother heard me mispronounce the word “faucet”, saying “flaucet”. She told me I was wrong and I told her that I didn’t care and I liked my way better and I was going to say it that way. (Secretly, in front of everyone else, I began to pronounce it correctly, but in front of her, it was always “flaucet”. Now, I just avoid the word in front of my mother altogether, lest she be right.)

My husband & I were both early avid readers, and loooooong before we met, as early teens, each of us did the same thing to our fairly conservative mothers. We asked to be taken to the “ADULT BOOK STORE” because that’s where the more interesting books are sold.

When I was young, I thought that the fuses in the fusebox were like batteries and the electricity was in THEM, not in the fusebox itself…until I stuck my finger in and touched the copper connection where there was a fuse missing. The lights flickered, my hair stood on end and my arm buzzed for a long time afterwards. I now have a very healthy respect for electricity! lol

– Pancakes and cupcakes were literal translations of the things they are & not just arbitrary names; this blew my mind
-I once covered a letter in a shit ton of stamps b/c I thought it would reach it’s destination faster, my parents still make fun of me for this.
– Just last week I googled “Where do all the bugs go in the winter”, for which I felt great shame and embarrassment.
– As a child I thought the ‘Black Market’ was a literal place where lots of salacious transactions occurred.
– I thought that term to ‘take something for granted’, was ‘taking it for granite’ – not sure what my excuse is there.
– When I was little I thought I could take on the hereditary traits of anyone my parents dated – When I found out I wasn’t part Native American just because my mom’s boyfriend was, I cried.

When I was little and heard about how Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier, I pictured a black man breaking through a rainbow in left field. This is still the first thing that comes to mind when it comes up.

When movie commercials said “coming to a theater near you” I assumed they meant the theater around the corner from my house. I also thought that “I brake for squirrels (etc)” meant that they loved them so much it broke their heart. And I thought (until I was 18) that a “set of drawers” was pronounced and spelled “set of draws”. Thanks Long Island accent.

OMG – My People!
1) It’s “I believe in Malcom” – not “I believe in miracles.” I always wondered who Malcolm was.
2) I was playing Barbie dolls with my little sister and she asked me to “pass her a clo” — clo being just one of a group of Clothes.
3) Same thing about oranges – a section is called a “Reenge” because when you put them together they make an “O-Reenge”
4) I lived on a cul-de-sac and the sign at the entrance said “No Through Street” — I thought that meant that no one was allowed on it. I was always worried about what “they” would do to us if they found us on it.
5) I thought those little appetizers were called “Whores dee oo-erves” and my sister thought they were “Whores de Vors”
6) I read a book called “Pride and Pre-Jew-dice” but talked about being preh-je-dissed against black people.
7) I was showing my daughter Charlotte where I went to school — in Charlottesville, VA. My youngest asked “Where’s MY Vill?”
8) My older sister went to the University of Virginia – UVa. When I was little I was so confused – I knew that the U stood for University and the V stood for Virginia but I could never figure out what the A stood for.

The movie “The Ten Commandments” plays every year around Easter. When I was growing up, with only the three network channels and one public broadcasting channel, that made it a big deal and it became a very entrenched part of Easter for me–like “A Christmas Carol” or “Miracle on 34th Street” or “It’s a Wonderful Life” are part of Thanksgiving and Christmas. As I grew older, it struck me that it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the resurrection, but I still thought of it as an Easter movie. I think I was in college when I finally realized it’s about Passover. Still to this day feel a seasonal need to watch that movie, and a tiny, utterly ridiculous spark of pride at having figured out the Passover part all on my own….

When I was really little, before I was able to read, my parents used to keep me in line on road trips by telling me those “Adopt a Road” signs with the pictures of forests on them indicated a “Child Spanking Area.”

For the longest time I had this horrific image in my head of a places in the woods where lines of bare-butted kids were being spanked by their parents outside their cars. O.O

When I was really little, before I was able to read, my parents used to keep me in line on road trips by telling me those “Adopt a Road” signs with the pictures of forests on them indicated a “Child Spanking Area” ahead.

For the longest time I had this horrific image in my head of places in the woods where lines of bare-butted kids were being spanked by their parents outside their cars. O.O

Hahahaha – thanks for the laughs. And the nods. I am 43 and thanks to you now know the Moody Blues song is Nights in White Satin and not Knights in White Satin, too. Changes my whole childhood imaginations of the song.

For 30 yrs, I thought a line in Seals & Croft Summer Breeze lyrics were ” and you’re waiting there without a cat on the wall” instead of “and you’re waiting there, not a care in the world.” I just got this last year & always wondered what in the hell the cat on the wall had to do with anything. Yay tribe.

In the Our Father I used to think “and lead us not into temptation” was “and lead a snot into temptation,” because I’d heard bad kids called “little snots” and figured God was leading them into hell but delivering the good ones from evil. I also thought “genitals” were called “gentles” because it hurt if you got kicked there.

I thought the reason my parents hated driving downtown with all of the one-way streets was that you HAD to turn in the direction that the one way sign pointed, like in one of those mazes in Highlights magazine. I was shocked at how they would break the law, even right in front of a police car.

Until I was in my early 20’s I thought Cat Stevens was signing “..come and BE STRANGE” instead of Peace Train. I’m still pretty freaked out about NIGHTS in White Satin – I had always somehow pictured the song about something having to do with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and assumed they were the knights on the horses.

Also, every morning in the traffic report the guy referred to the “depressed section” – naturally I assumed he was referring to the poorer areas of town – I learned (again in my 20’s when I got a “real” job) that its where the highway goes below street level downtown.

I thought the “State of the Union” was a speech the President gave about the Best State in the U.S.A. When I first heard about the “State of the State” address I figured that the counties were like little states when you were the governor. This was all cleared up when I finally was watching the State of the Union with Dad and I asked him which state he thought was going to “win” this year. I was 14.

I used to think eggs were considered dairy because, you know, Milk and Eggs. And that the objects in “objects in mirror are closer than they appear” are IN the mirror and I could not figure out why anyone would care.

Wait. So Smooth Operator isn’t about a telephone operator?!? huh. On anotehr song related note… I was in my 30s when I found out that Michael Jackson was singing “thriller thriller thriller” and not “get up, get up, get up”. I hate it when my husband is right about things.

I was certain for many years that Kenny Rogers was claiming that Lucille left him with “four hundred children” and a crop in the field. When I realized it was a measly “four hungry children” I decided Lucille wasn’t quite the witch (or whore) I originally thought she was.

The irony of George Strait’s song “Ocean Front Property” was completely lost on me, and screwed up my understanding of US geography for years. I was probably at least 12 or 13 when I realized that Arizona is not, in fact, on the ocean. And ditto on thinking eggs were dairy- I’m 29, and I just figured that out about 2 years ago during a conversation with my lactose-intolerant husband.

When my wife was a kid, the local priest, Father Harold (Hal) Lloyd, moved to another parish. Her slightly younger sister was extremely confused about why the the prayer they said every day would *not* be changing (“Our father, who art in heaven, Hal Lloyd be thy name”)

I got very excited when I learned a few years ago that a tanooki was a real animal. To be fair, I’m pretty sure that goombas and koopas aren’t real. But as it turns out, you CAN get your very own tanooki suit (if you get a raccoon dog coat).

Many years ago, I watched the movie Stigmata and a coworker asked me what it was about. I started telling her the plot and she interrupted me in a confused way and asked what the big deal was about having stigmata. She had it and so did a lot of people she knew. I was taken aback and asked, “so, you all bleed from your palms and the tops of your feet?”. She was horrified and said that they just had blurry vision. Stigmata and astigmatism are different.

I apparently had problems with fonts and logos. Ross for YEARS looked like IZOSS and someone had to patiently explain it to me when I was a teenager. I also thought the Disney company logo was confusing with a backwards cursive G instead of a D. My sister explained that one.

When I was very little my brother told me the middle finger of the Statue of Liberty was a mile long. It wasn’t until we started studying measurements that I realized this was false.

My son sang “Vivian Killed the Radio Star.” And must have thought Vivian was a very evil woman.

My daughter argued with me that tortillas were different from Fajita Buns. Our entire family now calls them Fajita Buns.

There is a warehouse sized store here called “Strictly Feathers.” I was completely confused as to why anyone would need that large a selection or variety of feathers. It wasn’t for quite some time that I learned it is a bird and bird supply shop.

And crap – reading these comments I’ve been screaming out me too! I always thought that the people on the TV waited for my TV to turn on. They didn’t live in my TV; but they knew when I turned it on so they would start playing the show for me. The commercials were prerecorded but the show was waiting for me to start.

In hindsight; that should’ve been a screaming signal to my parents about the crazy that was lurking; but I’m good now.

I was watching Celebrity Apprentice, and commented on Lou Ferrigno with disgust, “Just what nationality IS he, anyway?!” because he is so hard to understand. My fiance looked at me and said, “Deaf. Lou Ferrigno is deaf.” I had no idea.

I just busted out laughing at this post at the same moment my boss came in to talk to me about computer updates. He said he wasn’t sure what was so funny about updating computers. Then he gave me a piece of chocolate and waited for me to calm down. I love my job!!

I thought putting cream in ones coffee was a sin. My parents were fundies. BIG time fundies. They did not drink, smoke, or swear. We went out to eat every Sunday. The waitress would ask if they wanted cream in their coffee. They would shake their heads ominously and say nooooooo. Apparently, I took this to mean that cream was a sin. One day, I was 12, we were out to dinner with my father’s side of the family. This was rare as they were Mormons and my mother did not like hanging out with them. My favorite uncle took the cream for his coffee and I burst into tears. My mother said, “what in the world is wrong with you”. I said that Uncle Dude was going to hell for putting cream in his coffee. The room went silent. My parents looked at each other and asked why in the world I thought that. I told them that cream was a sin. I told them that they NEVER took cream just like they didn’t drink, or smoke, or swear. Of course, everyone there thought this was adorable and hysterical. I was mortified.

I thought Hall & Oates was “Haulin’ oats”, which was a really lame band name. Why would anyone name their band after a giant wagon full of grain? Also, that the Allman Brothers were “All Man Brothers”, which duh (!) they’re brothers, of course they’re all men!

@ Liz 192…. OMG I don’t know how many years as a child I sang that jingle and my mother would bust out laughing. I thought I was being amazingly funny. Then at some point I asked what was so funny. After that I refused to sing the jingle and would turn bright red every time the commercial would come on because my mother would sing “Pussy Cow”.

I am still convinced it is Knights in White Satin. People, don’t you know not to believe everything you read on the internet? Nights in White Satin is obviously wrong.

I also thought my dad invented the word “situation”. I was completely shocked when I heard a non-relative say it — I didn’t realize my dad’s word was that well-known. I also believed my dad when he claimed to be 29 — even though my oldest sister was 22 at the time.

you know on The Price is Right where they say “contestants not appearing on stage will receive the following items” and then they’d show a blender and some rice a roni and other consolation prizes? well, I thought that meant EVERYONE in the world that doesn’t appear on the TPIR stage was going to get those prizes and I kept waiting for a big truck to arrive with all of our stuff. but it never came. sigh.

I grew up in Dodge County and until I moved away for college I thought that the phrase “Get out of Dodge” referred to Dodge County. I assumed that in other Counties you would say things like “Get out of Washington” or “Get out of Union” (whatever county they happened to be in).

I have a friend of a friend who, in her mid-twenties, asked if unicorns were extinct or just endangered. So my friends call these kinds of realizations “unicorn beliefs”.

Someone told me when I was little that thunder was just the clouds bumping together. I believed that; or, more accurately, never questioned it; until about a year ago when I told my son the same thing and my husband fell out laughing. He still teases me about it.

Ha! These were all great! I guess my embarrassing confession is that I always thought the lyric to the Jimi Hendrix song was, “Excuse me, while I kiss this guy.” Even more embarrassing, I didn’t know the truth until I was 30…

Jesus Harold Christ! I’m 37 and I just learnt it is NOT knights in white satin. Thanks @ottawagrrl.
I always just thought they were gentle and good knights and the white satin was a metaphor.
A bit shocked I could create a metaphor about it but couldn’t just drop the K!!

My 10yo asked me if we could go visit Farmer John. I asked who that was, and she said you know, Farmer John’s cheese… that we put on our pizza. I’m still not sure if she believed me when I told her it is Parmesan cheese.

I always thought the car KNEW when you were turning and turned the blinker on for you. How convenient right? It wasn’t until I started driving that I realized that in fact was not the case. I had a friend who similarly thought that the car knew when to switch gears, and the first time driving with her mom, she backed out of her driveway and her mom kept telling her to “drive” in an increasingly louder voice, until she floored it and they ended up in the yard across the street. She quickly learned why the car didn’t switch over from reverse to drive.

Along with the song lyrics, I thought for so long the song was “we built this city on rock and road” that I still can’t help but sing it that way even though I know the error of my ways.

Holy crap.
1. Roy Orbison was NOT blind?
2. My sister thought it was “I hurried through the grape farm” instead of “I heard it through the grapevine.”
3. My sister also thought it was “every time you go away, you take a piece of meat with you.” Which may explain why she likes to hide the salami, if you know what I’m saying.
4. My nephew thought we start out as cartoons before we’re born into real people.
5. My best childhood friend thought the Material Girl line, “If they don’t give me proper credit, I just walk a-way-yay” was actually, “If they don’t give me cup of pennies, I just walk a-way-yay.” She was a cheap date.
6. Off to Google “knights in white satin”, because if that’s not right then…???

The tragic part for me is, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with “Knights in White Satin” – even after my husband said, “Like evenings in white satin”…so I googled Knights in White Satin. I did not feel better after google showed me results for ‘nights in white satin’. Not. At all. Better.

I always wondered how “they” got the seeds out of seedless grapes without smushing the grapes until I walked by a seedless watermelon at the grocery store a couple of years ago. Major lightbulb moment.

It wasn’t until my Junior or Senior year in High School that I found out Alaska was not an Island. I really believed it was because of how it is boxed up on the map like Hawaii. When people talked about driving there I thought that *they* were the ones who needed more education. Sigh.

Um, I only found out reading this blog post that Roy Orbison wasn’t blind. SO y’all have nothing to be ashamed of. (Unless it’s Rick Perry. People should be ashamed of Rick Perry, since he won’t do it for himself.)

My cousin used to mishear lyrics all the time, the greats include:
Droolin’ on a Sunday Afternoon (Groovin’ on a Sunday Afternoon)
There’s a bathroom on the right (Bad Moon Rising)
Diarrhea Jane (Diary of Jane)

Ok … I’m cheating here. This isn’t something I believed, but it is something that my husband’s EX believed. She thought that there were really bodies buried at all those road side accident shrines you see all over Texas.

I thought the line in “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid said, “pregnant women, sick of swimming, ready to stand.” Until my husband pointed it out to me a few years ago. “Bright young women” makes much more sense.

I grew up in a city near a Frito Lay’s Factory. When I was quite small, I thought mashed potatoes came from the steam that came out of the plant – my Mom would never make mashed potatoes for us, except on Thanksgiving and Christmas, so I assumed they were more expensive because they had to go through the whole plant process.
Apparently, clouds confused me a lot: I also thought, based on Bugs Bunny, that dead people’s souls went up escalators made of light. So, anytime there were clouds with light streaming through them, I assumed people were going to heaven – you couldn’t go if it were cloudy or dark (I didn’t logic out that they went to hell – I just figured they waited in line patiently). And, this meant that heaven was literally on the clouds – I’d often wave to my grandfather or other dead relatives when there were big clouds around us.

I had a student this year, a junior in high school, discover, to his shock, that chickens laid eggs that were not fertilized, which are the eggs we eat. As he pondered this idea, he actually said out-loud, “then, how do the other eggs get fertilized and what happens to those eggs?” I replied (being his American History teacher), “Chickens have bird sex and those fertilized eggs make new chickens. Do you need more information?” At which point, the entire class cracked up – fortunately, they were my tribe and it was not any more embarrassing than any other story/discussion/question we had together. Thanks for a very good laugh!

Oh, and I believed for many years that the the lyrics to “All Star” by Smash Mouth said “She was lookin’ kinda dumb with her finger and her thumb in the shape of an ELF on her forehead.” I wondered How she learned to make her hands look like elves.

I thought that turkeys were only raised on farms, regardless of seeing them in my friend’s back yard as a teen. I didn’t find out that they roamed free until my boyfriend (now husband) told me he was going hunting for them. I was really not impressed and asked what the sport was in hunting a turkey that they kept fenced in. 12 years later & I still haven’t lived that down.

One of my good friends in college thought the octane ratings for gas were actually the year the gas was pumped out of the ground. She couldn’t understand why in 2003 we had such high gas prices, “since we were still using gas pumped out in 1992”

Oh, and when I was a kid I thought that the city changed the stop lights to red and green just for the Christmas season. You know, to be festive. I was also CONVINCED my uncle was John Denver! I mean, they looked the same, they both played the guitar, my uncle lived in Boulder, CO where I thought John Denver lived. CONVINCED!

Omg, thank you Kit for the number 652 comment because I am 33 and I still thought it was ‘for all intensive purposes.’ Also, thank you for having the same name as the car on ‘Knight Rider,’ because that is just awesome.

Until I was 25 I thought that ‘make ends meet,’ was ‘make ends meat,’ like as in: In the end, you want to be able to afford to put good food on the table, and in my mind, if you had enough money to buy good meat, you accomplished ‘making ends meat.’ Does that even make sense? I wonder if anyone else ever thought that was what it meant…..

I used to think that you had a child name and then got a new name when you grew up. (Sort of like baby teeth and adult teeth.) I reasoned this out by the fact that I knew absolutely NO kids with my parents’ names and happened to know no adults with the same name as my classmates. (I might actually have but just called them Mr. Smith or Mrs. Jones instead of John or Jane.) I assumed you were just assigned a new name and had no control over it. I wondered what name I’d get when I was an adult. (Wait… does my blog name “TechyDad” count? Maybe I was right after all!)

When my son and nephew were around 3 they liked to sing to my 1 year old daughter in the car to keep her happy. One day I noticed that my nephew was singing about an “Itchy Bitchy spider” going up a water spout. No matter what I said, he was convinced that my version of the “Itsy Bitsy spider” was wrong. O.o

1. Growing up Catholic, I never could understand why we were praying for our scissors (…pray for us, Sinners, now and at the hour…)
2. I thought “the Boondocks” was a place like New York or Arkansas because we would always practice driving in the boondocks.

Um yes on the reindeer thing. Only recently did my husband explain that YES there are reindeer, but NO they do not fly.

I thought that football fields grew that way. In high school I saw some coaches “chalking the field” and asked what they were doing, they told me and I was stunned. I literally had just never thought about it and figured those numbers and such grew out of the ground and that is where football fields were born.

When I was about about 3 years old I was visiting relatives in New York with my family and they kept asking me if I wanted to go to the kiddie pool and I got so excited and couldn’t wait to go. As soon as we got to the pool my face fell with disappointment, because there were no kittens in sight. My little girl brain thought they were saying “kittie” pool not kiddie pool. If I wasn’t terrified of goats (at the time) I would have been more pissed that weren’t baby goats there either. harrumph.

When asked what my European background is I answer that I am 99% German and the other half is Polish. My mother so ingrained the answer that I didn’t get the joke until my late 20s. ….. I am a mathematician.

When I was four, I went to kindergarten where I encountered my first non-white person. She was the school secretary/nurse and she was black. I didn’t understand how anyone could have skin like that, so I came up with the conclusion that she must have a disease that made her look that way. And then I decided it was contagious. I was terrified of the poor woman. I obviously didn’t live in a very diverse area.

Up until I was in the second grade, I knew that thunder was made by the sound of a sleigh with four men in it wearing top hats, sliding across the clouds. No one ever told me this (and I never told anyone, either) I just knew it. I’m not sure I believe that stuff about lightning. I like the sleigh better.

I didn’t know until my twenties that the La Jolla I saw written and the La Hoya I heard about were the same town.

One day when my daughter was young, she was obviously searching for something. I asked her what she was looking for and she said, my clo. Turns out, clo is the singular for clothes, and she was only looking for one item.

My first 6 months in New York City, I thought the subway announcer urged to ‘stay away from the platformage’. It wasn’t until I read an article about how someone was ‘pushed off the platform edge’ that I figured that out. I laughed for an hour straight.

I belong to a medieval/renaissance re-creation organization (the SCA) and used to be one of the people who organized demonstrations for the general public. We’d march in parades, show off rapier fighting, sing madrigals, do calligraphy, etc.

I must have talked to hundreds and hundreds of adults while I was in this position. Every so often…I’d meet up with someone who assumed that all our medieval paraphernalia was REAL ARTIFACTS that were made in pre-1600 Europe and kept in like-new shape by our dedication. You could tell the believers because they were UNBELIEVABLY impressed at every gown, pen, rapier, etc. they saw, ooohing and aaahing and talking about how it must be extremely expensive to play this game. I started off disabusing them of this notion, but sometimes it was easier to just let them believe.

This type of person would get awfully confused when I would mention “eating real medieval food”, though!

I thought it was Knights in White Satin until I red this now I have to go look up what it really is! UGH! I had to book mark this because today was an extremely crappy day until I read this and just had to laugh!! I am apparently the only village idiot!

I also totally forgot another village idiot moment in my life………. I will preface this with I am a natural blond but I thought for years you had to change you oil only when the light came on in the car! I have since married a mechanic and even after 26 years together I still can not live it down!

My Mom called my brother “vacant” for years as he never seemed to be listening or complety “there” in family conversations. After years of this, my brother finally looked at her deep in her eyes and said….”Mom’ why do you always call me Bacon”?

I think there is an entire generation of Pacific Northwesterners that have sang of Cal Worthington’s beloved Pussy Cow. I always imagined it was a cat sized cow that was really cute… still can’t sing Go See Cal… 🙂

After the Knights revelation… (get ready for more mind blowing reality). You know in that ELO song they aren’t singing “Don’t let me down… BRUCE”? I just found out this year they were saying gruuuuse… A made up word. 35 years I had wondered why Bruce was expected to screw up so bad they had to sing about him. Now I have no clue what the song is about at all.

I used to think “Gaper” was a location in the city I live in. I would listen to the radio and it seemed an obvious solution, some reconstruction needed to be done at Gaper. I told my mother, (I was 28) it was clear, there is always a “gaper delay” being reported during rush hour, why not just fix Gaper, vwherever that is?! She laughed so hard at me!

I thought NO PASSING signs meant you had to stop and not pass that point. I thought if I wrote to the little girl I saw in the Shirley Temple movies on Sunday morning TV and told her she would get breast cancer when she grew up, she could avoid it by taking precautions. I thought color film was invented while The Wizard of Oz was being filmed so they switched as soon as they could.

I thought blow job meant when someone was really mean to someone and was giving them the cold shoulder. My now husband corrected me when I used it in a sentence at a party trying to describe how mean this one woman was to the other woman. I was 21-years-old at the time.

I thought that the way the doctor tied off the umbilical cord determined whether a baby would have an “inny” or an “outy” belly button. During my first pregnancy,when I asked my ob to essentially “give mine an outy”, she explained the truth while my husband cracked up.
I thought “Frontage Road” was a really common street name until I was in my 20’s.

@ Jenny Neff # 162 – I always thought that those oil spots were where rainbows had touched down until about 12 or 13 years old.
I thought a classmate’s parents were dwarves, (I was completely facinated by the idea) until I met them, turns out they were divorced.
My song lyric blunder is “It’s a long way to the shop, if you wanna sausage roll”.

I used to think that “necking” was where one person lies on their back and the other person lies facing down, at right angle to the first person, intersecting with their throats touching.

I used to think there were windshield wipers on all of the car windows, but that I kept looking at them at the wrong time and missing them in action.

I used to think Tampax had something to do with Tampa, Florida, where I was born.

I used to think that only men drank beer, and was shocked… SHOCKED, I tell you… when I saw my next door neighbor’s mom popping a beer open.

My mom’s parents told her that steak tasted like liver (apparently so they wouldn’t have to share their steak with her). She didn’t find out otherwise until she went on a date with a guy in college who ordered steak. She said, “Ew, how can you eat that?” He responded by offering her a bite, which she bravely took. Her mind: blown.

When I was younger, when I heard some one had an olive complexion, I thought they meant the outside of the olive. So I was constantly looking for green people. Then, when I was older, I figured people were just insane with that comparison of olives to skin color. Lol.

Ok someone is going to have to explain the innie / outie / belly button / umbilical cord thing now. This is the second or 3rd time I’ve seen that mentioned and I’ve always thought innies and outies were all about the doctor’s technique! If they clamped it too close, there wasn’t enough to poke all the way in so you got an outie, and if they clamped it too far, then you got a really deep belly button, but the really good doctors knew where / how to clamp it so that after it healed it got poked in “just right”. That’s NOT the way it works????? I’m not sure which is more traumatizing — this, or the pineapple thing!!

When Smokey the Bear would come on TV to announce that “Only YOU can prevent forest fires!” I literally thought he meant only me. I worried so much that I wasn’t doing my job, and what would happen to me if a forest fire happened?

I used to get totally confused when my parents said we needed to “run errands” because I thought they were saying “run Erin’s.” I embarrassingly admit that I was in my teens enforce I fully figured it out.

I thought “misled” was pronounced “Mice-eld” and was a separate word from “mislead”. I also thought Cyndi Lauper’s name was spelled Cyndi LauPIS and was so convinced that I bet my stepmother that it was. (We drove to the record store to prove it. I think the stake was a piece of gum.) I still pronounce “aspartame” to rhyme with edamame, even though I know better. If we’re going into mondegreens (http://www.kissthisguy.com/), I thought the last line of the chorus of “Billie Jean” was “the chair is not my son” and was very confused. I also thought “Flashdance” was saying “Take your pants off / and make it happen” which made more sense than the original but seemed very racy to me at age 13.

Oh! I also thought “bother” was “father” and would say “Don’t father me!” to my little sister when she was annoying me. When I learned I was wrong at like age 6, I blamed it on her and said she was the one that thought that, not me. It was so mean because I seriously tried to gaslight her into thinking it was her, but luckily she was never fooled.